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To carry a league-high usage rate while playing the second-most minutes in the league is a preposterous kind of workload. James Harden shouldered it impossibly well, producing (36.1 PPG, 7.5 APG, 6.6 RPG) in a way that no other player in the league could. Capacity is its own kind of skill. Only certain skill sets can scale up effectively, and only one like Harden’s could function at this ridiculous extreme.

No player on this list could do more for an offense with less help. Where players like Giannis Antetokounmpo rely on the spacing created by others, Harden makes his own with a game-breaking step-back. Through that, Harden took more threes off the dribble last season than the next two highest-volume shooters combined, and hit an impressive 36% of those highly difficult shots. Where even Stephen Curry and LeBron James lean on their bigs as pick-and-roll partners, Harden can always fall back on the fact that he is literally the most dominant isolation player in the world. Basketball is a game of all sorts of complicated codependencies. Harden can choose to participate in them (as in a pick-and-roll with Clint Capela), but he doesn’t have to. Staring down a defender in a one-on-one situation at the top of the floor has become, in this specific instance, a perfectly viable system.

Yet every system has its complications. Playing alongside Harden is technically quite easy but mentally a bit challenging. All you have to do as a role player is defend hard, crash the glass, and knock down the shots Harden creates. But all you get to do as a role player is defend hard, crash the glass, and knock down the shots Harden creates. Some players (like P.J. Tucker) are suited brilliantly for this. Others have fallen to passivity or grated under the framework. There will always be limits to what one player can do in those five. When a game starts to slip away, it can be hard not to dwell on those limits. It’s an odd dynamic. Harden can create an incredible amount of offense for his teammates, though in doing so, he deprives them of a certain authorship. So long as you’re contending—and Harden alone gets you close—maybe it doesn’t matter.

But all this comes into play when evaluating Harden against Stephen Curry, specifically. It’s a matter of usage vs. ubiquity. Running an offense through Harden means allowing him to dominate the ball. Running an offense through Curry, on the other hand, means playing in the space he provides. Every second that Curry is on the floor, he is exacting a toll on the defense. That gives him a slightly wider sphere of influence than even Harden, and a game perfectly suited to playing alongside other superstars. In a league where aligning multiple star players is the clearest way to a title, having a game that allows for that kind of accommodation can mean everything.​

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